Find No Greater Love Crafted By Levi Benkert Rendered As Textbook

Greater Love was a great initial memoir of a family's first couple of years in Ethiopia.
Levi Benkert writes an honest and poignant account of his involvement with orphan care in rural southern Ethiopia.
He shares his joys and disappointments, It was a quick read but that did not take away from the impact of the story.
I look forward to a follow up memoir as I am sure this family will continue to do great things for the Lord in the beautiful land of Ethiopia birth place of mychildren.
Awesome narrative of a family who picked up and moved to Ethiopia to run an orphanage.
God had other plans though and they humbly followed His will for them, eventually starting Bring Love In a unique ministry that brings together widows from local churches with orphans into forever families the bring healing, restoration and purpose to all.
The Benkert's are a wonderful family that I had the pleasure of staying with for a few days, and this is a wonderful story told in a very humble, transparent way.
Levi Benkert was a successful Sacramento businessman untilwhen the economic downturn forced him to close his business.
While his life in California was falling apart he was presented an opportunity to go to Ethiopia to rescue orphans.
A tribe in the south of Ethiopia regards some children born under certain conditions as mingi or cursed.
These were children who are conceived without the parents announcing their intentions to the tribal elders or children whos top teeth come in before their bottom teeth or any number of differences from what is considered normal in that culture.
The tribe lives in fear that if the mingi child remained in their midst they would bring on them ill will from evil spirits.
So the traditional practice was to abandon them to die from exposure or starvation, However through the mediation of a local man named Simi and some German photographers who were there shortterm, the tribe agreed to allow Simi to remove the children from the tribal land instead of killing the kids.




Levi embarks on a two week mission where he sees these kids who were rescued, feels acutely the weight of the problem and is moved to do whatever he can to help.
Shortly thereafter he returned to Jinka, Ethiopia with his wife and three kids to run an orphanage for the rescued children.
They had sold all their belongings and lived off support that a church gave to them.
As Levi tells his story, he in honest about where he and his family wrestled with culture shock, personal motives was here to escape his business failures or to help, mistakes he made, and the challenge of being both culturally sensitive and courageous in his stance against injustice.
This is a Christian story, and so the themes of surrender and trust in God permeate Levis life in Ethiopia.


Without giving you all the details of Levis story read the book for yourself, the situation with the tribes in Southern Ethiopia has changed somewhat with the Ethiopian government taking a more active interest in managing orphans.
Levi and his family now run another orphanage in Addis Ababa which places orphan children in homes with widow care takers a creative way of fulfilling James:.


Despite my enthusiasm about missions, I sometimes am wary of problems in various missionary organizations i.
e. ethnocentricity, paternalism, etc. . I also am suspicious of much of the international adoption agencies because of an array of injustices perpetuated by some organizations.
On either score, I found little in Levi Benkerts memoir to make me wary of his project.
He and his wife decided to adopt one of the mingi children, and were involved with setting up adoptions for others but tried to do so in ways that respected Ethiopian culture but didnt profiteer from the children or the system.
They conducted their mission in Jinka and Addis Ababa with a high level of integrity, I was pretty impressed. That being said, I know nothing of their mission except what I have read in this book and have not researched the situation myself.
A Note to Reader at the end of the book gives the link to their ministry website bringlove.
in for those who want to learn more, On a personal note, I find books like this where people take huge risks to do something good inspiring.
You probably will too.

I received this blog from Tyndale Publishing House in exchange for this fair and balanced review.
Rather disappointing.
I'm so glad that they were able to save lives and bring some attention to this terrible tradition.

They were told over and over that the tribes killed the children at the command of spirits, and their response was good.
They immediately told them that there was a God that was so much stronger than those spirits.
The disheartening part was that was as far as any mention of the Gospel went, Prayer was mentioned, but just

in passing, There was not even any mention of any type of Christian instruction for the children in the orphanage.
Now this doesn't seem to be just an over sight of a short book, even on the websight they've set up there is no mention of the Gospel.

So even though they are sacrificing so much and have saved so many lives, they are not making an eternal difference.
If they had said this book was just about helping people and not tried promote it as a Christian book or ministry I wouldn't have anything but praise for them, because the secular world has nothing more to offer than the is world made more comfortable.
Christians can't ignore the message of Christ crucified for our sins, buried, and risen again on the third day,with out hiding heaven from the lost.
What is a Christian if not one who proclaims the Good News
That's why I found it most disappointing.
They are giving these children a better life here and not even offering them an eternity in heaven.
A young California couple pack up and decide to move to Ethiopia to prevent the killing of the marked children.
Children killed to appease the spirits and prevent misfortune to the village are rescued by their pleadings.
It is a sobering reality that sees failure and death as often as rescue, They live in a hard place where God demonstrates that true love is sacrificial and emotionally costly.
Such an inspiring book! I loved it,
Wow, to drop your job, and move to Ethiopia with your family! Lots of faith there.
I loved reading about the plight of the children, so awful what was happening to them.
It was amazing to read about their rescue, I loved how it showed the hardships for the Benkert family, They are so inspiring to me, and one day I hope to do something half as amazing.

This book shows God's grace, and how He never forgets us nor forsakes us, I definitely recommend it to anyone especially those interested in missionary work! While I enjoyed this story I felt that it only began to skim the surface of the Benkert's work and experiences in Ethiopia.
I would have liked to know more about the local tribes and their belief in mingi.
I would have liked to learn more about the children they rescued and about the Benkert's life and struggle to assimilate into Ethiopian society.
With his realestate business crumbling around him, Levi Benkert receives a phone call, An old friend wants him to travel to Ethiopia to aid an effort to rescue children who've been sentenced to death by an ancient tribal practice.
The idea is ludicrous. There's no way he can go, Yet Levi soon finds himself on a plane bound for Ethiopia, It's the beginning of a change that will dominate, change, and revolutionize life for him and his family.


I got this book for Christmas and the whole family got a laugh when I unwrapped it.
I already knew what it was about, but I flipped it over to skim the back cover.
As I did so, my mom said, "It's a really good book, You need to let me borrow it because I'm half way through it, " That's right. She'd been reading my gift before wrapping it! :P Anyway, she was right, I read it in one sitting, It's heartbreaking. It doesn't have a strings all tied up "happy ending", The ending is happy, but only after a heart rending ending to the first part of the Benkert's journey.
I expect reading about the mothers of the mingi children would be even more heartbreaking for a mother.


One of the things Levi says in this book is that orphan care is inherently messy.
This becomes obvious just reading books about it, It gets confusing. The last book I read about orphan care, sitelinkOrphan Justice: How to Care for Orphans Beyond Adopting great book!, really stressed how important it is for kids to be in real families.
. . that orphanages aren't the solution, This book shed light on how messy international adoption can be, Another documentary I watched shared the tremendous need for international adoption, It's confusing! But it's also really good to get all the different sides of the picture.


This book is definitely one of the best told/written orphan care stories I've read.
Thumbs up for recommending it, A good story. A quick read but I feel like I was looking for something deeper, I had looked forward to reading this book because of my own experiences in Ethiopia, I read it in one sitting, The style of writing was good, but I think the main factor that drew me so deeply into it was the pure honesty that was used to tell the story.
The author courageously admitted faults and showed his mistakes, The story, itself, was heartwrenching and fascinating on it's own, With the human touch that was added with it, the story was nearly perfect,
The only reason I gave it four instead of five was because I was left with some questions.
I felt, especially that some loose ends were left untied, Also, some of the sections seemed to be repetitive often wording or styling was almost exactly the same.

However, I loved the book, I would absolutely recommend it, My niece is one of the children rescued by this ministry, What a blessing to those in need, No Greater Love is an amazing, heart changing book, Levi Benkert was a successful California businessman until the economic downturn in, One day he got a call asking him to do a short, two week trip to Ethiopia to help with an orphanage rescuing children who were being killed by their own parents due to an Ethiopian superstitious practice called mingi.
Unsure, he decided to go, thinking he may clear his head while in Africa, Long story short, he falls in love with the children and moves his whole family from California to Ethiopia.
We watch as Levi and his wife, Jessie, and their family experience major struggle and also major joy.
This book will no doubt change your perspective on whats important in life, I love reading missionary stories and this was no exception, The author and his family left everything and moved to Ethiopia, basically on a whim after receiving a call for help, to care for orphans who were abandoned by their families because of beliefs in strange curses.
The author speaks very openly and honestly to their struggles, failures, and victories on the field.
Appreciated the real life nature of his writing, Eye opening but challenging as well to live intentionally wherever you are planted, .